p.

2.
love you. And how miserable I am away from you.
I must have written those thoughts in every letter I have sent
you - but I hardly ever stop thinking in those & similar
directions.

And now I must get on with some news for you.
In my last letter, or last but one, I was telling you about my
leave in Cairo - & had progressed as far as going to bed
on the Saturday night. The Sunday was the day arranged for
our journey to Memphis etc. We were up early & met Abdul,
our dragoman, & the taxi, just before 9am. Our first
destination was Memphis - & this is a little over one hours drive
from Cairo, & all the way along the banks of the Nile. The
Nile, or as much of it as I saw, is very much the same as
any other big river - it is immensely wide at this point, &
very slow & sluggish, & of course rather dirty - & it has some
fine bridges over it. Sailing up & down & tied up on either
side, are innumerable large sailing barges, very low in the
water, & having enormously high sails - about 50 -60 feet high;
when they go under bridges, the mast comes down flat
along the boat. These barges being up all the cotton
& other produce, & many of them go along the very
narrow irrigation canals & emerge into the Suez canal,
where their cargo is reloaded onto ocean going ships.
But, of course the most interesting thing in these
parts, is the irrigation from the Nile. Egypt is really
just one large tract of desert & if it were not for
the river, would I suppose be more or less
uninhabited desert. Rainfall is practically nil - & I have not
seen a drop as yet. But the Nile runs slap down the
middle, & so for centuries there has been a country